Polarity's Journey

For friends who aren't following me on Facebook, we had a Derecho storm (that's like a tornado except it's a straight line) through our area and we were badly hit. A tree got thrown onto my roof and punctured the roof in 7 places. Roofer is telling us that we will absolutely need a complete new roof, and also that the wooden underlayer to our roof is rotten through-- apparently it's been that way for a long time, way before we bought the house. The roof isn't pitched steeply enough to repel snow and ice, that's what they think caused the rot. The roofer is going to ask for new roof and new underlayer, but we have no idea what our coverage will be like-- will find out tomorrow when meet w/insurance adjuster. It will, however, consume our savings without fixing the things we need to fix, and will probably need family help to get through it all. Not fun!

We have no power (currently hanging out at R's company, which has a/c, power, and ICE WATER, WOO!) and may not for a couple more days. Lost everything in the fridge and freezer, obviously, and what really sucks is that the worst of the water that fell through the roof hit my Wicca/Pagan/occult bookshelf-- not the books I set aside to sell (those, ironically, are fine) but the ones I've been collecting for 20+ years. We we grabbing and tossing aside as fast as we could while holding buckets up to the smashed roof, but I don't know how many books will come out ok.

We're surviving, trying to keep spirits up. What's most frustrating is that Rob is contractless again. There are two hopefuls for contracts, I'm crossing my fingers because I don't need to say it's the worst possible time for job loss.

How did all of you do w/the storms?

This entry was originally posted at http://northern-light.dreamwidth.org/220870.html. Please comment there using OpenID.

Hail to all of my friends on the Longest Night, may the returning light of the new year bring better tidings to all of us.

(On a personal note, I don't think I've ever *felt* Yule as strongly as I do this year. I'm getting a hell of a head-thwapping from the Gods to seriously and thoroughly change my life. So I think 2012 will be a heck of an interesting year, I just hope not "interesting" in the very bad way that 2011 was.)

This entry was originally posted at http://northern-light.dreamwidth.org/1078.html. Please comment there using OpenID.

WHAT THE FUCK WAS THAT SHIT I JUST WATCHED? (On YT, obviously, as I don't raid.)

Spoiler text, highlight to read: Green Jesus is now having a baby and that's the future of Azeroth? The aspects are now mortal because they say so? What the hell? Haven't they canonized him enough?

Blizzard, what is this fuckery? You're really making me want to join the Skyrim legions, you know.

Originally posted at Dreamwidth. Comment on whichever you'd like. :)

Here's a fiction question for you all: When, after the long wait and confrontations with lesser villains, you finally get the big climactic confrontation against the Big Bad, how much does it matter to you how it dies?

Does the fight have to be huge in scope? And ending?

I'm half considering having mine taken out, after a long tense confrontation and the trading of some supernatural blows, by a sniper's bullet. (A very particular sniper, who is herself pretty important in the story.) Half of me says, like some wild Hollywood director, "not big enough!" but the other half argues that it would be nice, for once, to see a super-powered adversary killed by an ordinary means. (Always did want to see someone snipe Voldemort...) Especially after a lot of angsting about how to kill him without harming anything else around him. "Bang!" *plop*

Just made me curious about the larger question of how people feel about villain confrontations in SFF in general.

Haven't posted anywhere in a million years, hopefully this will change.

Warning: Some of this is spoilery.

I like GRRM for his systematic demolishing of fantasy tropes that really, when you think about it (if you think about it) don't make a lot of sense. This remains, IMO, this book's best strength. ( Collapse )

Originally posted at Dreamwidth. Comment on whichever you'd like. :)

I saw an ad for the Wounded Warrior Project on my TV tonight, with a soldier who lost an arm in the war talking about his PTSD and "don't suffer in silence" as a slogan.

I can't find it on YouTube or I'd link it, but I thought it was a good thing to see and a good thing for the average American to see-- it'd be nice if there was more understanding and respect for people with PTSD, both soldiers and civilians.

wabbitseason couldn't make the Ren Faire last weekend, so we went out and got Reach instead. New canon, squee! Have done the first two campaign missions so far and a ton of solo and co-op Firefight. So if you're playing, please don't spoil me with anything about the campaign past the meeting with Halsey (Halsey! In game! And she's completely badass!).

So far I'm still getting a feel for the weapon changes and the way they've changed things around. Like my controller, having RB be melee just fucked with my head so much that I had to change it back. Kept walking up to jackals and wondering why B did nothing!

Love: the needle rifle! Actually, pretty much all the Covie weapons, especially the higher capacity needlers. Seeing Halsey in game! The scenery is gorgeous. The knowledge that you're fighting a completely losing battle really means something when you're playing. The Skirmishers! They're like Super Fashionable Jackals, or something. The fact that you don't have to go skull-hunting all over again. That you can get PVP medals in Firefight! We'd otherwise never, ever see Killionaire or Killimanjaro.

Don't love: The music, and I never thought I'd say that about a Halo game. I found the music on the first level to be completely intrusive and just not epic. I hope it gets better.

The team, yet. IDK, maybe they'll grow on me. I just find myself missing John and Cortana a lot more than I expected to, and I don't know these new Spartans.

The new armor abilities, or at least some of them. Like the jet pack, love the new bubble shield, hate the camo and the lock-- still not sure what you're supposed to do with abilities that only work when you *don't move*, unless you're in co-op and you're sniping?

Hunters. I haven't figured them out yet! Okay, did they change the rear hitbox on them or something? Because we melee'd one of them on the first level and he went down fast, and the rest are being obnoxiously hard. I don't know if we're not hitting them in the right place, or with the right weapons, or what. They're unusually pesty.

The lack of understandable enemy voices. I know, they're supposed to be scarier and more alien, and they are. I just miss the snarky Grunt comments. I still kind of want to adopt them, though. :)

So, Halo players, what do you think of Reach?

"Eat Pray Love" is now a movie, I think I just threw up in my mouth a little. And "from the creator of Glee", how completely not surprising. One of my least favorite books in the world becomes a movie from the person responsible for my single least favorite scripted show in the world.

I'd rather watch a marathon of Twilight films for the next week straight than two minutes of that thing.

Going from terribly offensive movies to just so-terrible-it's-hilarious TV, is anyone else watching "The Gates"? "Her succubus nature hasn't yet emerged"-- I just about fell over laughing at that line. And right after I said "they've got vampires, werewolves, and witches on this thing, what else are they going to shoehorn into it? At least the cop!son's girlfriend is also a mundane..." Succubus. Teenager. Top that, SMeyer! (I guess when she graduates she'll get a whip and her own warlock to summon her into Azeroth?)

I can't believe Robert Hewitt Wolfe is attached to that disaster. He's producing this mess that I can't look away from, and JMS is wrecking Wonder Woman. Dang. :(

BTW, what the holy hell did they do to "Lie To Me"? That show was must-watch for me, but this season is just unmitigated awful. I feel like I'm watching bad fanfic of it instead of the show it used to be. Someone on TWOP said that it felt to them like Fox is trying to turn Lightman into House, and that nailed it perfectly. I'm a pretty tolerant viewer when it comes to suspension of disbelief, and I've said "oh, come ON!" at some point in every episode I've watched since it came back on. I may have to just take it off my season pass list, I don't want to watch another good show flush itself.

I've also given up on So You Think You Can Dance. I loved that show so much, but I can't handle any more of Nigel and Mia. She's so unreservedly pompous and cruel and he's so jaw-droppingly racist that it completely eclipses the dancing. Every season it's another rehash of "let's put people who aren't contemporary on the show, and then quickly eliminate them as soon as we can" that I wonder why they even bother. And Sonya Tayeh hasn't done anything as good as "The Garden" since, Tyce's Broadway is unwatchable, and WTF putting them in *animal costumes* for an African dance?

At least Burn Notice is still good-- better than it was last season, I think. I love Jesse, and Fiona and Madeline's criticism of Michael has been completely spot on.

Can't wait till the normal season gets here.

Here, have a cupcake icon. :)

So... about the post I made earlier tonight... rants that build up over months come out even rantier than I usually am, I'm not usually *quite* that bad, I don't think...

Anyway, welcome!

(A friend on Facebook put up a really interesting post on tithing, and she linked to the article I'm about to address in it. I wish I could address and link to her post, but proper blogging etiquette is to give a linkback in that post to here, so that she and her commenters, if they wish, can comment here. But I really, REALLY do not want this account linked to my real-name one on Facebook (if you follow me on both, please respect this and don't ever mention this username there) because I discuss a number of fairly sensitive issues here and value the privacy of my pseudonymity. Her post, I think, was a better one than this article and a whole heck less frivolous, but you works with what you gots, and this is what I've got to work with.)

So, should Pagans tithe to their parent grove/coven/organization/Hof? Here is the article I'm commenting on, have a look at what they suggest a Pagan tithe could be used for:

# Pay college tuition for a Pagan child. How can education not improve the world?
# Join or start an investment club that uses socially-responsible screening or shareholder activism which meets your goals.
# Use it to make up the difference to buy recycled, free-range, organic, hormone-free, sweatshopless dolphin-safe stuff that usually costs more than you can justify spending.
# Give it to homeless people.
# Take in a stray animal.
# Donate to your favorite charity.
# Adopt a polar bear.
# Spend the dollars at Pagan businesses.

It's actually a pretty good representation of why I think tithing is a lousy idea in the broad at this point in the development of organized neo-Paganism-- it's unfocused, and some of it is fantastically frivolous. I've got a lot of thoughts about this, let's see if I can pin it down a bit more.

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